Krautrock
Instrumental. Usually no vocals at all.
In short
A tireless motorik beat, studio improvisation and a refusal of the chorus. It shaped post-punk, post-rock and electronic music.
How it sounds
- The motorik beat: four to the floor, unvarying, for ten to twenty minutes.
- Studio improvisation later assembled at the mixing desk — the tape is an instrument.
- A refusal of the chorus, of virtuoso solos and of American blues.
Hear what that means
- Motorik
Straight four-four at about 130 bpm with no fills and no variation, played by a person trying to sound like a machine. It is the most influential rhythm on this branch of the tree.
Open on YouTube - Tape as composition
Eighteen minutes assembled by editing long improvisations rather than performed, with a vocalist inventing phonetic language over the top.
Open on YouTube - Repetition without development
Twelve minutes on essentially one idea, titled after the joke the British press had made of them. The interest is in what repetition does over time rather than in what the figure is.
Open on YouTube
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 1 of 3 is cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 120-150 bpm
- Song length
- 6-20 min
- Tuning
- Standard, and largely irrelevant — the guitar is a texture and much of the genre's identity is in electronics and in the drums.
- Production
- Built in the studio by producers who were part of the band, using tape editing as composition. Long takes cut and reassembled rather than performed, which is why the records feel simultaneously live and impossible.
- Written about
- Mostly none — the vocals are frequently phonetic, invented or absent, Motion, Machines, Deliberate refusal of an English-language rock tradition
What each part is doing
- Drums The motorik beat: a straight, unaccented four-four at about 130 bpm with no fills and no variation, played by a human trying to sound like a machine. It is the most influential rhythm on this branch of the tree.
- Guitar Repeating one figure without development, treated with delay and tremolo. The interest is in what repetition does over ten minutes rather than in what the figure is.
- Bass Locked absolutely to the kick, unvarying, and the reason the pulse feels inevitable rather than merely steady.
- Electronics Synthesisers and tape used compositionally — loops, edits and sequences that predate the machines built to do them.
- Vocals Where they exist, phonetic or invented, and treated as another instrument. Damo Suzuki was improvising sounds rather than singing a language.
What it isn't
That it is a German genre with a shared sound. The name was a British music-press joke, the bands mostly disliked it, and Can, Neu!, Faust, Kraftwerk and Amon Düül II have almost nothing in common musically. What they share is a negative: a generation with no interest in inheriting American blues-rock, working in a country whose recent past made cultural continuity impossible, deciding to start from somewhere else. The unity is a refusal rather than a style.
Told apart from
- Psychedelic rock Krautrock comes from the same 1968 impulse with no blues in it at all — a deliberate refusal of the American vocabulary that psychedelia is built on.
- Space rock Space rock drifts and floats; krautrock drives. The motorik pulse is the opposite of a drift, and it is the whole difference.
- Post-rock Post-rock is the most direct descendant, and it took the repetition and the instrumental approach while adding a crescendo krautrock never wanted.
- Zeuhl Zeuhl is the French parallel, arriving at similar strangeness through jazz and opera rather than through minimalism and machines.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
The postwar German generation wanted music with no trace of either American or German tradition. Can worked through tape editing, Neu! invented the beat Bowie and all of post-punk would later borrow, and Kraftwerk left for pure electronics. The label 'krautrock' was coined by the British press and is mildly pejorative.
Descended from
Branches into
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Post-punk 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
- Math rock 1.4 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
- Avant-prog / RIO 2.0 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.